Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
On the September night that the baby was delivered, Richard stood beside the bed and said the helpless but encouraging things fathers say: “You’re doing a great job, darling. Now it’s going to be time to push again. That’s it: push, keep pushing, keep pushing, really push now. That was wonderful, Laura.” He was babbling, too excited and too proud of Laura to really remember the lessons they had taken. What most impressed Richard about the process of birth was the courage, even the heroism of women—he thought that if men had babies, there would be a lot fewer people.
After ten hours of labor, Lump was born in Norrington Hospital on September thirtieth, weighing seven pounds one ounce, twenty-three inches long, normal and healthy in every aspect, and female—as Richard had known she would be. The following day, Richard and Laura decided to name her Philippa, for no reason other than that they both liked it. “Philippa?” asked the nursery nurse, a big good-natured black woman with a thick wiry corolla of hair. “Whatever happened to good old normal names like Mary and Susan? Seems like nobody uses those anymore.” Four days later the Allbees took their daughter home to the lovely new house on Beach Trail. Richard had managed to decorate the room they had chosen as the nursery, but in much of the rest of the house the walls were unfinished and exposed pipes rattled against plaster surrounds and junction boxes sat like spiders in the centers of immense metal webs. It was as Richard had explained to Laura years before: the restorer’s house was always the last to get restored. “I’m glad you’re not an obstetrician,” Laura said.
As Philippa grew, she resembled Laura—her hair was that same delicate watercolor shade of red—much more than Richard, and from the start, this sweet, sober, questioning child owned her father’s heart. Richard and Laura never tried to have another child; Philippa seemed to take so much love from them, and to create as much as she took, and the Allbees never seriously considered filling a void they could not see or feel. When Philippa was five, they enrolled her in the Greenbank Academy.
By then their house was restored, and Laura’s prediction had come true, though a year or two later than scheduled: Richard had offers of so much work that he could only take half of it. By now they were thinking seriously about that apartment in New York, the more so since Laura knew that she wanted to look for a job when Philippa was a few years older.
When Philippa was in the fifth grade, Laura began interviewing for jobs on magazines, with publishers of all descriptions . . . and in six months she had found a job as an assistant editor with a paperback company.
Laura flourished in this job, but the Allbees’ marriage became shakier than at any time since their move back to America. As Laura became more experienced with publishing, Richard could not help his resentment over how much time she spent away from the house, away from him: he had to accept that Laura’s job had become almost as important in her life as her marriage. The Allbees fought and strained with and against each other for eighteen wretched months.
By the time that Philippa went off to Brown University (Richard drove her up to Providence, and looked up Morris Stryker in the telephone book while he was in Providence, expecting not to find him, and did not—either dead or unlisted), Laura had been named editorial director at Pocket Books; and Richard had become more successful than he considered he had any right to be. He spoke at convocations and symposia around the world, he and Laura had made many trips back to London, and he had an office in New York as well as one in Hampstead. He employed two young architects passionately interested in restoration work (and one of them, he thought, seemed as passionately interested in Philippa). In Philippa’s junior year at Brown, one of Laura’s young discoveries wrote a book that instantly began to sell more than twenty thousand copies a week, and went on to sell steadily until they had printed more than two million copies; and Richard got the most important commission of his life, to restore a famous Victorian country house designed by Sir Charles Barry.
That Thanksgiving, Laura and Richard and Philippa had a long, consciously celebratory dinner in their Hampstead home. The Allbees drank a bottle of Dom Perignon before dinner, and then went into the dining room to feast on the goose their cook had roasted, and all the other, more traditional foods she had made—the stuffing, the acorn squash, cranberries, potatoes, mince pie.
The doorbell rang just as they sat down. Richard groaned, saying that it might be a delivery of plans from the New York office. No, Laura said, it could be the messenger service delivering her new star’s next manuscript a day early; she stood up and left the table as Richard started to carve the goose.
When Laura opened the door, Richard glanced sideways—a chilling blast of wind, wind so cold it felt black, had whipped into the dining room. “What?” Richard said, putting down the long carving knife. He turned toward the door, and in that second saw Billy Bentley walk forward toward Laura through the door: Billy walked in on that rising, whipping black wind and his eyes were glowing. In the next second he slammed a knife into Laura’s stomach and hauled it upward toward her heart with gleeful and inhuman savagery.
* * *
All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.
* * *
Richard rolled over in bed and blinked up at the ceiling: he did not feel sane, but whatever sanity he’d had was the inventor of this elaborate and cruel fantasy. At times he had almost believed it; no, at times, prostrate here in this bedroom, he had believed it. He had seen Philippa being born, and he had seen her face when she was able to ride her first two-wheeled bicycle, when she had been first in her class in a test. He had seen that page of the Providence telephone directory, the row of names that did not include Morris Stryker’s, and heard Philippa’s voice asking him, “Who are you looking for, Daddy?” These invented things he had seen had probably kept him at least as sane as he was; and had probably kept him alive too—for the past five days he had been in shock so deep he had almost needed to remind himself to breathe. As Leo Friedgood had dosed himself with alcohol after the death of his wife, Richard Allbee had fed himself on imagination.
* * *
About nine o’clock on Tuesday night, the seventeenth of June, Richard had taken Exit 18 off the Connecticut Turnpike, swung down the Sayre Connector to Greenbank Road, crossed over the bridge from which Turtle Turk had threatened to drop Bruce Norman, went past Wren Van Horne’s house and the entrance to the beach, and from Mount Avenue turned into Beach Trail. He had rehearsed so many alternatives in his mind—there had been a power failure, there had been a burglary, Laura had been trying to dial him and was now on the highway to Providence—that all he wanted to do was see his wife and make sure that everything was still all right. Among the alternatives he had considered was a fire, and so he felt easier as soon as he got far enough along on Beach Trail to see the back of his house.
The light inside the back door was on, Richard noticed as he drove into the garage. He got his suitcase out of the trunk and carried it across the drive to the back steps. Then he opened the back door and called his wife’s name. He entered; dropped his case just inside the door.
Richard went down the hall toward the front of the house. “Laura?” he called. One of the lights in the living room was on, and he saw that Laura had hung up several of their paintings on the long wall at the back.
He wandered through the living room and out into the hall again. This time he noticed that the front door was open; and when he noticed that, he caught a heavy, unfamiliar odor on a drift of air: it had come from deep within his house.
Standing there in the empty hall beside the open front door, Richard had wanted to go back out the rear door, take his car out of the garage and drive all the way back to Rhode Island—all the way to Maine, all the way to the Arctic Circle and the end of the world, if need be. His heart had lurched in its rhythm, and for the last time he whispered her name. He touched the open door, swallowing hard, and pushed it shut. Then he turned to face the house.
Richard went into the dining room, saw th
The kitchen was empty. On the counters were swirls left by a damp rag. Beside the sink—like a severed hand—lay the red receiver for the telephone. On the little table were boxes of unpacked glasses. One of these boxes had fallen to the floor, and a bright scattering of broken glass lay on the tiles. Such small signs of disorder.
At the far end of the kitchen was a pantry Richard was planning to remove. It was a small enclosed space with aluminum tubs, a washer and dryer, and handmade shelves all the way up to the ceiling. Richard forced himself to open the door to this pantry; then forced himself to pull the cord that turned on the light.
At first he saw nothing but the washer and dryer. He held his breath and walked into the small square room. He looked at the shelves and saw a thick layer of dust, an old pair of striped work gloves. Dusty fruit jars with red caps had been tented within a furry spiderweb.
When he looked at the side of the washing machine he saw a splash of blood.
She had answered the door, come into the kitchen with her guest . . . then she had known she was in danger, and she had picked up the telephone. The man had cut the phone line. Laura had run into the pantry and squeezed herself down beside the washer. She had already been hurt.
What then?
He did not know if he was strong enough to know what had happened then.
Holding his hands to the sides of his face, he came out of the kitchen by its back door and went down the narrow back hall. At the bottom of the steep narrow back staircase, in the old days the servants’ staircase, he found another splash of blood.
So she had burst out of the pantry and climbed the back stairs. He groaned, set his foot on the bottom step. His body seemed paradoxically heavy enough to flatten the step, so light it could float upward at the slightest push. He walked up half a dozen steps, breathing in short agitated gasps.
Halfway up the back staircase he saw a bloody palm print on the wall above the handrail. On the top step lay another splash of blood, already dried and brown.
He went straight ahead to the room they had chosen as Lump’s nursery. It was the nearest room; it was where she would have run. Richard stopped before the nursery door, kneading his hands together, and all at once caught that unfamiliar odor again; now he recognized it as the smell of blood. He gently pushed open the door of the nursery.
Just inside the door a silver-and-brown thing lay on the old carpet. It took Richard a moment to recognize it as human flesh, another moment to identify it. Laura was frozen back against the nursery wall, her blood splashed like a bucket of paint over the window above her body. Richard moaned like an underground animal: like a wounded badger. He stabbed on the light, starting to give in to the frightened weeping that had been building within him. Lump too had been riding on the Dragon’s back, the shapeless little thing that would have become his Philippa. She was beside Laura, what there was of her.
Laura’s mouth was open, her eyes stared at him; Lump’s mouth, too, was open. Richard stood before them, so incapable of movement that he could not even tremble. Finally he saw that the opening torn in his wife’s belly was filled with flies, and he screeched so loudly that the effort let him move backward out of the nursery and into the hall.
6
The being who had once been Dr. Wren Van Horne sat in his darkened living room and faced the old mirror the doctor had bought. What it saw in the mirror were scenes of devastation and ruin—smoking rubble and heaps of shattered bricks—the timeless scenes of its landscape. Streets heaved upward into impassable mounds of broken concrete, buildings burned down to their foundations, bridges sunken into the water they were supposed to cross, huge piles of ash flaring up, tongues of fire flickering around their circumferences as a bitter wind rustles through, then subsiding again, breathing out a sullen smoke. . . .
Then a shuffled deck of pictures rolled across the surface of the mirror. The faces of screaming children, troops moving across a wide street, the trenches and mud and barbed wire of the First World War, the emaciated bodies of concentration-camp victims—bodies starved down to catgut and gristle . . . these images too were timeless, and represented both past and future. Children with swollen stomachs and the faces of old men, hunched men and women picking their food off a barren hillside.
Now the being saw suspended in a towering wave of blood the faces of all those who had died since the seventeenth of May. Joe Ricci, Thomas Gay and Harvey Washington, Stony Friedgood and Hester Goodall, Harry and Babe Zimmer and fifteen firemen, Bobby Fritz, all the others—their faces and bodies floating in the red wave.
Then the towering wave subsided, and the being in Wren Van Horne’s living room saw platoons of children swimming off Gravesend Beach, forcing themselves to go beyond the markers, making themselves swim when they were so exhausted they could scarcely make their arms lift out of the heavy pink water . . . then he saw them swimming back toward shore, their bodies dark with bottom-mud and hung with ropes of weeds.
He turned in his chair to look hungrily out of the wall of windows facing the Sound.
Yes.
Standing on the seawall at the edge of his lawn was a silent crowd. He moved to the windows to let them in.
The first one to step in through the opened windows was a small boy wearing the torn and faded remains of a blue T-shirt. On the shirt there still lingered a barely visible photograph of Yoda.
7
With burning bowels and a pounding head, Turtle Turk worked the traffic light on the corner of Riverfront Avenue and the Post Road the following morning. He was recovering from the worst bout of flu of his life, and by now he knew that he should have stayed home another day. He saw double for a few seconds, and shook his head. His guts squirmed; soon it would be time for another of his half-hourly visits to the crummy little toilet in the back of Abrazzi Liquor—the liquor store stood right behind him on the south-east corner. It was just his luck, Turtle thought, that he got the flu so late in the cycle: by the time he fell sick, everybody else had been over their flu so long they didn’t even remember how rotten it had made them feel. All they cared about was covering his place on the duty roster and subtracting sick days off his schedule—Turtle could still work himself up into a fine hot resentment by thinking that none of his fellow officers had even visited him at home. (The warmth of his resentment probably kept him from seeing that his frequent loud diatribes about the assholes who called or came by his camper at night had decided everybody else that Turtle hated to be bothered at home.) But this morning Turtle had enough to make him percolate with resentment without rehearsing the callousness of the younger policemen.
First there was the damned button, and second there was the urge to grow hair on his palms that affected every civilian once he got behind the wheel of his car. Any cop who did this duty had seen mild little people who would cry if shouted at suddenly act like savages in traffic—screaming out the window, blasting the horn, squealing their tires—but today it seemed worse than ever. Turtle knew that a couple of kids had deliberately swept so close to him they had almost run over his shoes. There was more than the usual amount of horn-leaning from the cars stuck behind the red light on the Post Road. Some of that was the fault of the button, but mainly it was just impatience—as if the places these civilians had to get to were any better than the insides of their cars. Worst of all, there had been two fender-benders this morning, and that was unusual for this corner; and in the second little accident, a big guy in a glen plaid suit had come boiling out of his Audi and run back to the little fatso in a Ford who had banged him—the big guy had torn open the door of the Ford and was battering on the fatso’s face before Turtle could get to him. And then he had only stopped the big guy by clubbing him with his nightstick. All that wasn’t easy on a man with a headache and a sick stomach. On top of everything else, he had a complicated report to write up when he got back to he
And if that wasn’t bad enough, some lady with frizzy Chiquita Banana hair and a cigarette plastered to her oversized lower lip had leaned out her window and screamed at him that there had been four murders, damn it! What are you morons doing about it? Picking your noses? Of course civilians were dumb as dogs, they didn’t know that the state was now running the murder investigations. And if they did, they probably thought that someone like Turtle would resent it—but Turtle thought the situation was just fine. Let the state do all the dogwork. A young jerk like Bobo Farnsworth probably thought that investigation was good for his soul, but Turtle knew that it was mainly just hard on the feet. If the state guys identified the killer, it would be the Hampstead cops who would take him in. That part was all right with Turtle.
“Well, me, lady, what I’m doing about it is, I’m giving the killer your name as soon as I run your license number through state records,” Turtle muttered to himself.
Then the button got stuck again. Turtle shook his head, getting purple in the face with rage. When he pushed the button on the little hand-held metal box, the signal was supposed to change on the traffic lights. And when it got stuck, as it did every other time this morning, he had to get across the street through the traffic and open the console on the sidewalk and jiggle a switch in the junction box; then he had to run back across the street and see if it worked. Sometimes the light just bit down on red or green and Turtle had to get out in the middle of the white circle and direct traffic with his arms and his whistle until the machine decided to work again.